I was freaking out when Brooks & Dunn were breaking up. I thought 'We play a ton of rodeos, and I thought this was such a cowboy deal, and I don't wear a hat. They might not think I'm a cowboy. That might sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but apparently, it meant something to me. I wound up with a cowboy tattoo from my elbow to my wrist.
You know who first started calling me 'The Cowboy' - Paul Richards. He loved to play golf and when he came to Los Angeles he used to call me up and I'd arrange for him to play at Lakeside and when he saw me, he always called me 'Cowboy' and everybody else in baseball picked it up.
When you audition for something, and you book it, you think, 'Okay, well, I got the job, and now I actually have to show up on set and do it.' So, you show up on set, and you don't know, 'Am I going to get swallowed up by these people?'
I've always been really hot on westerns. All my life growing up, cowboy, cowboy, cowboy.
If you're going to wear a cowboy hat, you're going to have to go all the way. You should have livestock around you, settle all of your disputes with a pistol, and ride a horse absolutely everywhere.
I was a fan of westerns growing up. Every boy wanted to ride a horse and be a cowboy.
There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, «Where are you going?» and the first man replies, «I don't know! Ask the horse!» This is also our story. We are riding a horse, and we don't know where we are going and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless.
People are always going to say, 'Who's he beat? He's only beat Cowboy.' So what you're trying to tell me is Cowboy is a nobody? Cowboy will be remembered as one of the greatest fighters of all time. And I beat him in one round.
I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested that I might be able to do the drama department more good than I was doing the swimming team.
I went into the audition room with the mindset that 'Little Fires' was going to be my last audition. I put my all into it, but I didn't get my hopes up.
There was one female role, which was Emily. When I did the audition, I flubbed up. It was my first audition back from Christmas break, and I flubbed up and was devastated. In the audition room, they were like, "Oh, you did great!," but you never really know. So, I left the audition in tears.
Guys want a 500 horsepower car. I'd rather have one horsepower - in a horse. That's macho. You go to pick up your date and you show up on a horse.
Oh my God, nothing compares to the pre-horse show jitters! It's like going on 'American Idol' or 'The Voice' all the time, because you're just going and getting judged for your entire show.
Let him ride a horse. He's a cowboy ain't he?
I may have gotten my first job from 'Backstage.' I remember going to the Equity offices, and I signed up for an audition. I left. I was grabbing a coffee somewhere and looking at 'Backstage' and saw that there was an audition for another project going on at the same time. It was called 'Almost Heaven: The Songs of John Denver.'
I knew I wanted to be in comedy but the path of least resistance was doing stand-up in folk music clubs where I could get on stage. I guess you could get up no matter how bad you were and you didn't have to audition. You just got up. Everything else required an audition and if you auditioned for a TV show, you would stand in line with a hundred other people. But at the clubs, it was okay just to get up, so that's why I started in stand-up.